I don't mean to mean to make you feel foolish with this metaphor, but your question is a bit like, "What should I have for dinner, Chateaubriand or fish?"
Azure and Lamba are not directly comparable. The first question is typically whether you're an AWS shop or a Microsoft shop.
It sounds like you're not bound by that and looking to do something on your own.
If your objective is to prove serverless computing as a concept and/or create something of a reference architecture, then that is a reasonable question to ask -- basically where should you focus to get get started, AWS or Azure?
Lamba is an entry-level serverless platform, and Azure is an entire ecosystem (it is really AWS vs Azure and AWS Lamba vs Azure Functions).
If you want to scale whatever you build into a larger environment, you're back to the question of whether you're operating (or your company) in AWS or Microsoft environments. Both inherent the benefits and capabilities of the ecosystems they exist in, and despite vendors' claims are really not cross-compatible.
Another consideration is application behavior. One of the benefits of Lamba is that it launches dynamically (event-driven) rather than having to be manually started/shut down or otherwise always running.
But the flipside to that is a cold start problem -- can you wait 10+ minutes for your app to fire up or does it need to be instantly responsive?
There are other serverless alternatives within the AWS ecosystem that carry more cost and complexity but don't impose the cold-start problem. At the same time, Azure Functions operate somewhat differently (and also impose greater cost and complexity) which allows some benefit over startup latency.
Overall, if your goal is to learn about serverless computing architecture and design, I believe you will get more out of Lamba.
But if this is not a learning exercise and you're evaluating platforms for production use, then there are more questions to answer than simply which one is better.
AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda executes your code only when needed and scales automatically, from a few requests per day to thousands per second. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With AWS Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. AWS Lambda runs your code on a high-availability...
I don't mean to mean to make you feel foolish with this metaphor, but your question is a bit like, "What should I have for dinner, Chateaubriand or fish?"
Azure and Lamba are not directly comparable. The first question is typically whether you're an AWS shop or a Microsoft shop.
It sounds like you're not bound by that and looking to do something on your own.
If your objective is to prove serverless computing as a concept and/or create something of a reference architecture, then that is a reasonable question to ask -- basically where should you focus to get get started, AWS or Azure?
Lamba is an entry-level serverless platform, and Azure is an entire ecosystem (it is really AWS vs Azure and AWS Lamba vs Azure Functions).
If you want to scale whatever you build into a larger environment, you're back to the question of whether you're operating (or your company) in AWS or Microsoft environments. Both inherent the benefits and capabilities of the ecosystems they exist in, and despite vendors' claims are really not cross-compatible.
Another consideration is application behavior. One of the benefits of Lamba is that it launches dynamically (event-driven) rather than having to be manually started/shut down or otherwise always running.
But the flipside to that is a cold start problem -- can you wait 10+ minutes for your app to fire up or does it need to be instantly responsive?
There are other serverless alternatives within the AWS ecosystem that carry more cost and complexity but don't impose the cold-start problem. At the same time, Azure Functions operate somewhat differently (and also impose greater cost and complexity) which allows some benefit over startup latency.
Overall, if your goal is to learn about serverless computing architecture and design, I believe you will get more out of Lamba.
But if this is not a learning exercise and you're evaluating platforms for production use, then there are more questions to answer than simply which one is better.